wget method

wget will simulate a browser hitting the cron_exec.php page each time it is called (once a minute).

wget will also save the result (the HTML you would normally see in your browser) into a file. By default it creates a new file every time. I don’t know where on the server this will happen, but that’s not something you want to happen. This is why we have included the option "-O cron_exec.html". I will make sure the output always goes to the same file named cron_exec.html.

We have included the option "-q" in the command above. It means "quiet"; in other words: "don’t talk to me, don’t generate an email to tell me what you did".

php CLI method

It will tell cron to run /cron/cron_exec.php as a php by using the command ‘php’ (the CLI Command Line Interface version of PHP). If the shortcut does not work for your host, you can use /usr/bin/php or /usr/local/bin/php

The > /dev/null part tells the cron to dump all non-error messages to /dev/null which is like a ‘blackhole’. You will never see these non-error messages again.

Other info

In cpanel, you can also enter an email address where the cron output will send you an email about what happened each time it runs. This is a perfect way to get a new email every minute of the day but it can get boring quite fast. So if you can, leave the email address empty except maybe for debugging.